Let's take care with subject lines, please...
On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 16:07 +0000, Philip TAYLOR (Ret'd) wrote:
>
>
> Sam Ruby wrote:
>
> > The co-chairs (Chris Wilson and myself) made a decision to publish based
> > on our assessment of the input received by the working group over a
> > period of several weeks and a number of phone calls. If you have input
> > on any or all of Chris's explicit request on the mailing list, the
> > minutes from the phone calls, or the issue in the tracker itself could
> > have been more clear on the matter, I would be glad to hear it. Or if
> > you know of some input that the chairs did not give proper attention to,
> > please cite it.
>
> It is not possible to know if there was any "input [to which] the chairs
> did not give proper attention", since we (the WG) do not have access to
> the workings of the co-Chairmen's minds. My point (and I do not wish
> to drag this matter out) is that I believe that, following the cessation
> of active discussion on 30th ult., the co-Chairmen should have reported
> to the WG that they had considered all points raised so far, and that,
> in their opinion, there were no outstanding objections to publication.
They did pretty much that in the teleconference of 29 Jan, with minutes
announce 2 Feb:
"RESOLVED: to publish the HTML 5 spec and the diff document"
-- http://www.w3.org/2009/01/29-html-wg-irchttp://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-wg-announce/2009JanMar/0015.html
The action to publish was then assigned to Mike; it took
him a little while to get it done due to travel etc.
I say "pretty much" because actually, there was/is one
outstanding objection, from Masinter/Adobe.
We like to have consensus, but we proceed without it sometimes:
"When the Chair believes that the Group has duly considered the
legitimate concerns of dissenters as far as is possible and reasonable,
the group SHOULD move on."
-- http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#Consensus
And of course, the transaction that concluded 29 Jan started 22 Jan
with Chris Wilson's proposal.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-wg-announce/2009JanMar/0012.html
> They should then have gone on to say that they proposed publishing the
> current draft of the specification as a WD on <date> and asking if there
> were any objections to this.
I don't see why *another* round trip through the WG would have helped.
> This simply did not occur, and the publication
> therefore took place without the informed consent of this WG.
I don't see it that way.
> Philip TAYLOR
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541 0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E